Chicken in Creamy Green Onion Sauce

It’s great to notice that the best dishes are usually the simplest. That is also the case with this simple but superb dish: easy to make, only 5 healthful ingredients and your taste buds hurtle to heaven! (Figuratively speaking…)

Tips for making the dish

The best result you get if you use low enough heat. The chicken might turn out dry if the heat is too high. Don’t overcook the chicken, that makes the meat tough.

The green onion (= spring onion) also enjoys the gentle warmth of medium-low or even low heat. The onion shouldn’t basically get any color, it should retain its fresh, bright green and white colors. That’s why it’s added quite in the end. If the onion gets color it easily tastes ugly and burned. Cooking the onion too long cooks away the fresh taste, which is the key here. Other than that, this is very easy dish to make. Just follow the directions and you definitely won’t suck seed but succeed (ouch, that was a bad joke…).

Oh, still one note about the thickness of the sauce. So, the thickness depends on how much fluid is left on the skillet from the chicken after cooking it until the state where juices run clear. If you prefer thick sauce, simply reduce the amount of fluid by cooking the chicken uncovered for the last minutes before adding the green onion. In the first photo of this blog post I have quite thin sauce whereas in the rest of the pics I have made the sauce thick.

So, here we go.

Heat a large skillet over medium-high heat. Take a good pat (2 tablespoons = 1 oz = 30 g) of butter and drop it on the skillet.

When the butter is melted and got some color (don’t let it get brown, though), add the chicken breast halves.

Turn the heat to medium-low, cover and let simmer for some 10 minutes, depending on the thickness of the chicken breast halves.

While the chicken is simmering, chop the green onion.

Use both the green and the white part.

Turn over the chicken breast halves, cover and let simmer for another 10 minutes or until the juices run clear. The total cooking time highly depends on the thickness of the chicken breast halves. Very thin pieces don’t actually need that many minutes.

When the juices run clear, add the chopped green onion.

Stir, and let the onion cook for 1–2 minutes.

Turn off the heat. Add the salt and the sour cream.

Mix well.

Cover and let stand on the stove top for 5 minutes. Mix well before serving. Bon appétit!

My experiments with this dish

Actually, I didn’t need to go too much to trouble with this dish, everything just fell to their places relatively easily. The order of adding the ingredients and the cooking times needed the most attention and some experiments before I was satisfied. Well, this hearty dish sure made me satisfied every time I ate it, whether my experiments were successful or not. But getting the best taste without any compromise was my aim.

My idea for this dish started simply from the contents of my fridge. I had chicken breast halves and green onions, both of which I had to use somehow. Anyway, chicken and green onion sounded like a great combination.

As I love rich flavors, I wanted to make my chicken dish creamy. Heavy cream would have been too lame, so I chose sour cream to give a slight sour note and a bit of the needed gentle tang. First I made the mistake that I let the sour cream cook too long. It curdled. Moreover, I used too little sour cream. Later I learnt that 8 oz (230 g) was just right to get enough sauce but not that the chicken would have been swimming in it.

In the beginning I used thin chicken breast halves. First I sautéed some green onion in butter, then added the chicken and cooked until tender. Because the cooking time was so short, the green onion retained its fresh taste quite nicely.

When taking the first photos for this blog post I used thick breast halves, which I hadn’t used before for this dish. Again, I cooked the onion in butter and added the chicken breast halves. This time however, the chicken took long to cook before it was done. In the end, after adding the sour cream, I noticed that the flavor of the green onion had disappeared almost entirely, so had the color.

I was wondering what to do and how to get the flavor of the green onion more prominent and first of all fresh. Suddenly it came to me, that maybe frying the chicken in the butter first and adding the onion after the chicken is done would do the trick.

That worked perfectly! I got the fresh, savory green onion taste I had hoped for. The color was also beautifully bright, nothing wilted there. Well, I had to take new photos, but that wasn’t too bad job, I love photographing anyway. And we got more tasty chicken to eat. Win-win.

Tips for variation

In my opinion this dish is perfect as it is. However, if you are a garlic lover you can add some crushed garlic together with the green onion if you like. Personally, I like the flavor of green onion in this dish and I don’t want anything else to steal the show.

If you prefer more sauce, you can simply use 12 oz (340 g) sour cream. You can also add another chopped green onion.

P.S. If you haven’t tried out yet my famous Turnip Fries, they make a perfect side dish with this creamy chicken. And if you would like to have some bread, this low-carb bread recipe is popular and extremely tasty in all its simplicity. For dessert, may I suggest some more heavenly creaminess with this indulgent low carb ice cream?

Wish I could insert a pic to show you, Ive recently started uni but have been trying to stick to a low carb diet so cooked this tonight wish a side of roasted carrots and asparagus… all I can say is WOW best tasting tea ive had in everrr, super easy, fast and cheap to make!! will deffo be adding this to the regular menu and might even treat my flatmates to it one night!
THANK YOU 🙂

This looks awesome! My hubby loves extra veggies tho so I was wondering how some fresh mushrooms would taste added in with the onions. He isn’t a fan of sour cream also but i think the onions will help mask that flavor…… is the correct?

Hi Ashley, thanks! I bet mushrooms are a great addition. It’s true that onion masks the sour cream flavor, but the result is anyway more sour than if you would just use for example heavy cream (which you naturally can use, you just have to cook it long so that it reduces and forms thick sauce).

I made this a few weeks ago and it was a huge hit! I plan on making it again and before I do I just wanted to verify that a green onion is a scallion? (probably a silly question but just wanted to check) Thanks in advance for your response and of course for the delicious recipe!

Hi Marissa! It’s fermented dairy product: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sour_cream. If you don’t find sour cream, you can use crème fraîche instead, or just plain, thick yogurt where you add some heavy cream to soften the taste and to make it a bit runnier. Hope this helps!

Hi Gisela, so great to hear that you family loved it! Chicken legs are best baked in oven. I suggest that you bake them in the oven until done, then place on a skillet and make the sauce following the recipe. How does this sound?

hey, i really loved this and cant wait to try it out! I know you have worked hard to perfect it, my father is a heart parient and is restricted from having rich food like butter! Can I use oil instead of butter and get similar taste if not the exact same!?

Hi Mobruka and thanks for your comment! You can use coconut oil or olive oil instead of butter, they are also good for the heart. Actually, after some thinking I recommend light olive oil because of its quite neutral taste, coconut oil might have too strong coconut taste for this dish. Hope it works out!

Thank you for your comment, you can find my recipes right here on my blog! I also have written cookbooks which you find from Amazon or just click that image on the sidebar on this blog where it says “Buy my Book”.

Hi Tina, it should be something sour and all purpose cream makes the dish too bland. You can try to add lemon juice, but as there is cream, it might be that it separates when you add acid lemon juice. If you only can find sour cream, I recommend it. Also a combination of plain yogurt and cream is fine.

Hi, already the word “Nestle” makes me goosebumps. I haven’t yet seen a product from Nestle which wouldn’t be full of artificial crap. Sorry for the hard words, but I recommend that you stay away from it. Nestle couldn’t care less about your health. Moreover, this recipe needs something sour it’s simply too bland with just regular cream, so I really recommend sour cream with it.

Hope you like it! I usually make something with cauliflower; if I’m busy I just cook a whole cauliflower and serve it as side, or if I have more time I prepare mashed cauliflower. Very basic… In addition I serve fresh veggies.

That’s a difficult question 🙂 I live in Finland and use German sour cream (or actually crème fraîche, they import it here). My advice is to choose sour cream or crème fraîche that contains as much fat as possible, is very thick and is without any food additives. Hope this helps!

Thank you very much for this, love to try this one. I’ve done similar recipe before and called it chicken in white sauce, and ingredients are cooking oil, chicken, carrot,potato and all purpose cream. Your recipe seems really delicious garnished with onions, and you suggested to try parsley. I will try this, and we have some basil in our garden, will will try with it too.

Well…I wasn’t that expert in the kitchen so that when I came across of your recipe I became interested and tried it at once. The ingredients are readily available and the procedure is easy. The taste is delicious and it didn’t make me looks like a trying hard. Thanks to you.

Wow. I normally don’t post comments on recipes, but this really deserved one! I was a bit hesitant about the sour cream, because I don’t normally eat it, but this chicken was seriously delicious! The sauce was the perfect consistency, and it only took a handful of ingredients that I already had on hand! I am so happy I found this recipe; I now know what to make on a weeknight after a long day at work! Thank you soo much for this!!

Made it tonight and it was heavenly! Thanks for the detailed tips. Otherwise I might have been more lax and not had the results I did. My son liked the sauce so much he scooped all left on the serving dish and put it on his baked potato. I don’t eat potatoes but my other family members do. This does satisfy my cravings for a sour cream and chive baked potato. Yum!

I was really excited to make this because we eat chicken for dinner about 80% of the time, and I am completely running out of ideas ! I was also really nervous because my boyfriend is extremely picky ! – as in he likes the flavor of onions, but not the onions themselves -. With that being said, I went super light with EVERYTHING. The taste was AMAZING, except it was super subtle. I found myself having to get up and add sauce several times. I look forward to trying it again with the recommended amount of ingredients. Thanks so much for the new recipe !!

Hi Lisa, you can also use regular heavy cream, however it doesn’t give that diverse flavor than what sour cream does. Moreover, you have to cook the heavy cream together with the chicken to reduce it in order to get thick sauce. Add the spring onion to the ready, thick sauce and let cook maximum 2 minutes. Hope this helps!

Hi Anne! kcal is the official abbreviation for kilocalories, Cal is equal to kcal, so both are used.

You can simply feed the calorie amount to Google, press enter and you get immediately the value in joules. For example if you type: 400 kcal and press enter, Google gives you 1 673 600 joules which you can easily convert to kJ (= 1 673,6 kJ).

Alternatively, if you would like Google to give the value immediately in kJ, you can feed: 400 kcal in kJ. Hope this helps!

I made this for dinner last night! I was amazing!! I did season the chicken with salt, pepper and thyme and I also added fresh mushrooms. I have picky eaters and they loved it! Thank you for the recipe.

I made this for lunch today. My son (who is definitely not low-carb; he eats like a typical teenage boy) loved it and so did I! So easy with ingredients I almost always have on hand. Served it with cauliflower “rice”. Yum!

This looks very good! I’ve done a similar sauce but with a little bacon added atop ground beef and pork patties and loved it. Sometimes I think the simple green onion is much underused in great cooking. I’ll TRY this. 🙂

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